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Visits For January, 2008

Sunday, 27th January 2008

A Beautiful Day Around Glenarm

I'm starting to love County Antrim more and more. Not only is it chocked full of wonderful monuments, but the landscape is beautiful and the people are so friendly. Stopping and talking to farmers is seriously slowing me down on my research, but I don't mind that much. It's a pleasure to pass the time of day with these great people.

Today the weather was outstanding. I was rather glad about this, because one of the sites I was visiting involved a 3km walk. The lovely, phallic standing stone on Ballygilbert Hill is great. I was very surprised at its size, too. I had expected something a lot smaller. The view over the bay below and out to sea towards the Maidens or Hulin Rocks and northeast to The Mull of Kintyre is pretty good too!

I managed to get to al but one of the sites on my list today as well as stumbling across a couple of cairns that I wasn't expecting to see. As well as seeing a few new monuments I also popped back to see the rather ungainly portal tomb at Ticloy (County Antrim) that I visited some 900 monuments ago.

Last week saw my monument count go over 1900 - quite a landmark. I'm not sure when I'll reach 2000 at the moment, because a lot of the ones I have not seen are rather spread out now: there's little opportunity to go and blitz an area and see 20 in one go these days.

I still don't know when the piece we recorded for RTÃ‰'s Nationwide program will be broadcast, but I'll let you all know as soon as I do. As mentioned last week I have rewritten one of my other websites - monu-metal.com, which features news and info about my books. This new site is now live.